This month (November)

November is nearly over and it's time for a quick catch-up of what we've been up to this month.

Autumn walks in the woods

 (with home-made dart shooters)

Visits to home ed group to do Chemistry, Spanish, Art, Arts Award (and time for dd to sneak off and play on the communal computer)

Bat-themed activities

Bat origami

Online bat jigsaws (here )

Putting together a festive mini-swap for Worldwide Culture Exchange (sent to the USA). Pick three to five items representing Christmas/The Winter holidays in your family and send it to another family. Mini-swap sign-up form can be found here (festive mini-swap open til the end of November)

Digging for dinosaurs in a wolf suit (thank you 99p shop!)

Playing lego games

 Fungal foraging

 And spore printing

 
 Enjoying outdoor times with friends

Looking at lichen

Sewing Christmas decorations and printing cards

Making a mobile of the solar system (printable here)

Ds digs up our area in the name of archaeology (and finds pottery, nails, bones and a medieval tile painted with a griffin) 

Leaf rubbings

Making a printer out of Lego Mindstorms

Artwork (experimenting with symmetry)

 Trip to Aldeburgh Poetry Festival (me, without the children). Hence plenty of time to take arty photographs...

Fencing competitions

Bug handling workshops

Thursday: Printing adventures, bugs, rocks and kerb crawling.

Thursday.

We all of us head for the University Press printing museum:

Ds1 tries to beat the speed of the camera shutter - Ha! Caught you!

The original printy thingy plate from the mouse's tale/tail in Alice in Wonderland

And then, the boys head for a printing workshop:

And with a little frustration, produce some fabulous hand-printed sheets of paper.

Meanwhile, dd and I discover a whole new meaning to the term 'kerb crawling'
There's a lot of kerb in our city. And it takes a long long long long time to crawl along it all.

Occasionally there are glimpses that she has inherited her mother's madness:

What big feet you have...(if you're a dinosaur)

Bugs, bugs, glorious bugs

That's me and the three kids. I'm the big flat one with bingo wings.

Then on to the rocks (oh joy!).

Dd takes 20 blurry photos of rocks while I go walkabout, take photos of unsuspecting tourists and wonder if I had a pocket of spit-dried-paper balls whether I could actually hit them. Ahem. And then I grow up again.

We rediscover the museum microscope

Elementary my dear Watson: dirty thumbnail, sign of a filthy child and a mother who doesn't give a toss.

Ouch! Attack of the killer stuffed animals. So that's why they say 'Please Touch': it's so gallery assistants can have a laugh watching small children being eaten by taxidermied wildlife.

Just time for a quick visit to the scary next-door museum with the pointy jangly people who stare when you put a quid in the box. Not forgetting the shrunken heads and the ghoulish masks.

And the best bit of all: a chance to see what people have dropped down the grill holes in the floor of the museum...

'Ooh! A pencil! A hairclip!'

'Yeah yeah. Can we go home now?'